learning

Those following this may have noticed a brief gap – after our first excursion it was all hands on lab and I have been running microscopy techniques since. With long days in the field, long days in the lab and planning meetings going until 11 every night, fieldwork soon starts to catch up with you.

Not that the last few days have been anything other than productive. Our field team headed out to Heimay, a small island off the south coast of Iceland that experienced a volcanic eruption in 1973. Our other field site, which the field team hit the next day is Landmannalaugar, a much older (but incredibly pretty) site.

The team at the Fimmvörðuháls lava field

After the two excursions, the whole team made the decision to stay at base and consolidate what had been happening so far. It meant we lost a day of sampling, but gave us: a) a well needed lie-in, b) a chance to work through analysing the samples we had collected in the previous days, c) the opportunity for some of the group to make headway evolving the strategy for the rest of the week and d) to really stop and think about our objectives for the expedition.

The ‘work-day’ proved to be a good choice and now we have much clearer goals and sampling strategies. Given that, the field group set off back to Fimmvörðuháls today to take a set of systematic samples that would allow us to begin to answer our science questions, while the lab team went about setting up the analysis protocols that will be used for the rest of the week.

The field lab at Hvolsskoli

It was also a special day, one of our group member’s birthday and so there was much rejoicing over a delicious bowl of chilli followed by pudding and cakes.

Now the rest of our team have arrived in Iceland, we began to make our way out to our field base in Hvolsvollur, after picking up our trusty steed, Marmaduke.

Travelling via a hardware store, world- [Iceland-] famous bakery and a supermarket to pick up provisions, as well as various tourist sites along the way for the few of us that were new to the island, we made our way to the Hotel Hvolsvollur, our base in the south for the next couple of weeks.

Upon arrival we found out that most our field equipment, which had been shipped separately, had met an unfortunate end at the hands of the authorities, with the hotel having to pay several thousand pounds worth of taxes… Oops.

Then came the most import part – food. Our field lab (when it arrived) would be set up in the chemistry classroom of the local school, but the kitchen at the school was also where we would be having our dinner. Everyone mucked in (with more than one argument in the kitchen arising), but eventually we had a rota of chefs for the week, and a hearty meal to toast our first night in Hvolsvollur with.

Tomorrow, we head out to two of our field sites at Fimmvörðuháls and Heimey.

So, the main bulk of our party has arrived. We’re still waiting on a few more, plus the delivery of our fearsome transport, but tomorrow we make our way to first the supermarket for supplies and then onto Hvolsvollur, where we will set up our field lab.

After collecting the new (mostly American) arrivals this evening we strode out into the Reykjavik evening for some nosh and after Wolfing down some pizzas were treated to a wonderful Icelandic sunset on the way home.

Zooniverse is a (growing) repository of projects that aim to involve the general populace in data processing for a diverse range of fields (from galaxies to cyclones to bats).

Let me say, right now, that I don’t want to denigrate Zooniverse. It’s a wonderful idea and has helped to link people to the science that their taxes pay for.

But (and you might have guessed there was a ‘but’ coming), let’s not pretend that it is something that it is not. It’s not, as far as I’m concerned, “citizen science”. It is data crunching, plain and simple, and I think it could be so much more. I’ve had a go at a number of the different projects and they were entertaining for about five minutes, after which I was often left thinking “yes, but what does it mean if that galaxy is elliptical and that one is spiral?” or similar.

Zooniverse often seems to be touted (along with projects like Foldit) as a new paradigm of citizen engagement with science, where non-scientists can really “make a difference”.

This apparent success clearly meant that this year’s Stargazing Live had to have a new ‘interactive’ element. The result was Planet Four, where people can annotate and categorise orbital pictures of the martian surface, in search of ‘black fans’ that can apparently tell us a lot about what’s going on. Some of my colleagues had some… interesting things to say about the project, but I hate throwing out baseless criticism, so here’s my attempt to be a little constructive.

It was hailed on this year’s Stargazing Live as another huge success (though nothing was said other than “Well done folks, you’ve looked at an awful lots of pictures), in which the UK population had provided a massive help to Mars science. Ignoring the potential issues with the validity of the science behind the whole endeavour, what Planet Four offers is a massive stack of newly categorised HiRise images. We have thousands of these already, thousands still uncategorised, and untold thousands of other images from other Mars missions. There aren’t enough Mars scientists in the world, and the ones there are don’t have enough time, to look at all these images, so yes, the people that take part in Planet Four are performing a valuable service.

These categorised, itemised images, though, are what happens before the science starts. Looking at these images, clicking, sorting, categorising, isn’t the science. The science is in the interpretation that happens afterwards. Connecting people to the science behind their Zooniverse clicks is difficult, and requires careful thought, probably from people cleverer than I, but sometimes it can be something simple.

Planet Four is apparently aiming to map “features [that] indicate wind direction and speed”. So why not ask people to say what they think the wind direction is? Add a button to the side to add an arrow (or more than one) to the picture to show the wind direction. Better yet, let them compare two images and say which one has a stronger/faster wind. Yes, ‘scientists’ might balk and say that people can’t make these kind of inferences without all the necessary information and a background in planetary science, but it would have the potential to provide interesting results and lifts the activity from mere number crunching to people making real inference from real data.

This simple change, I feel, would elevate the whole exercise, making it real science and stopping what I think is somewhat patronising slave labour. I’m sure others could come up with better, more insightful ways of doing this, for the other Zooniverse projects as well, but let’s not lose sight of the aim of really connecting people to the actual science, not just the data collection bit at the beginning.

EDIT: I’ve open this post for comments. I’m interested to hear what you think.

I am now officially registered for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, having passed the probation process.

My first year has gone like a whirlwind. I have read hundreds of research papers, books, attended meetings and conferences. In terms of actual research, I have not achieved what I had hoped, but am now in a position to really get cracking in the lab. The focus of my project has changed a little, but in my opinion, for the better. I am extraordinarily happy with my project as it stands.

Writing the literature review for my first year report, I was focussing on the martian atmosphere, what we know, how we know it, the processes going on, things like that. In the meantime, in my OU course (S216 Environmental Science) I was reading up on the Earth’s atmosphere, what we know about it… how we know about it… the processes going on… It didn’t really connect at the time, but started to give an unerring feeling when the assignment for that part of the course involved writing about how variable warming affects weather patterns, while I home I started writing an article on climate change about how… small changes can affect our climate.

But it none of these really sunk in until today. I changed tack with the lit review, starting to look at geology in a bit more detail. The papers I was reading were buzzing with the names of rocks – “hydration of periodite”, “primarily basalt and andesic composition”. Most of this would have made very little sense to me, at least, if I hadn’t spent to morning studying the composition of different igneous rocks like periodite, basalt and andesite…

It’s nothing more than happenstance, I suppose, but I think it shows that I’m on the right track.